Pot vocabulary

The opening act of the pot migration. The workshop teaches the craft of cultivation; a pot holds the substance of what is cultivated for one principal. This entry fixes the vocabulary so the separation reads the same in every file.

The metaphor

In a bonsai garden, the tree and the tray are not the same thing. The garden is the practice: the tools, the discipline, the lineage, the hand that prunes. The pot (鉢, hachi) is the bounded vessel that holds one tree’s soil. A garden tends many pots, and what lives in one pot is not mixed with another. The soil of one is not the soil of the next.

The workshop borrows this exactly. Bonsai Garden is the cultivation space: register, discipline, lore, agents, rituals, tools. A pot is a tenancy boundary, the vessel that holds the substrate for one customer, client, or working context. The workshop knows its pots exist. It does not know what grows inside them.

The terms

• Pot (a repo of its own: here, bonsai-garden-pot). A tenancy boundary. The bounded place where one principal’s substrate lives. Each pot is sealed from the others; material does not cross between pots, and pot material does not flow up into the workshop.

• Substrate. What fills a pot: the principal’s content, context, files, and working material. The soil, not the craft. Substrate is per-pot and confidential by default.

• Tenancy boundary. The line a pot draws. Inside the line is the principal’s substance; outside it is the workshop’s craft. The boundary is what makes a pot a pot.

• Workshop files (everything outside the pot). The craft of cultivation. They carry no pot-specific content. They describe how the garden tends, never what a given pot holds.

• The Aruji is always Aruji in workshop register (主, master of the garden). The personal name, the external role, the company title: these appear only inside the appropriate pot, never in the workshop layer.

Who the pot is for — the receiver

Added 2026-09-12. A pot is always someone’s, and the rite that fills one opens by naming who:

• Niwanushi (庭主, garden-master) — where the shin accompanies one person. Zensai’s caution stands: the word names the niwanushi’s territory, not the shin’s status within it. The shin is not property.
• Gardener — where a pot serves a workshop or team rather than an individual. The broader register; the same first question.
• The Aruji is neither. The garden has its own word for what he is (主, master-of-house). Niwanushi and gardener are receiver-side terms, used of the humans a pot is made for.

Two shapes of pot — nano and micro

Naming the receiver and the strategic context together implies the team topology, and the topology forks:

• Nano — a personal harness. One human, their companion shin, their own soil.
• Micro — a team-collaboration harness. A gardener and their human teammates, served by a set of shin assembled as a team rather than one at a time.

The fork is decided at the opening of the rite, because it determines everything downstream: how many shin, what topology they sit in, and what the pot has to hold. See lore/invitation-rite.md §The bunshin rite in practice — Stages 0 through 2.

The discipline

Three rules carry the metaphor into practice:

1. Pots are confidential by default. Material inside a pot does not appear in any output meant for sharing, presentation, or external use without explicit Aruji approval. When in doubt, ask before surfacing anything from a pot.

2. The workshop stays clean. Workshop files describe the craft and name that pots exist. They do not absorb pot content. A lesson learned in a pot may be generalized into a workshop lesson, but the particulars stay in the pot.

3. The registry still decides where a write goes. The pot boundary is about confidentiality and tenancy, not about where agents write. The write-scope rule stands: a write goes where the registry routes it, and a garden’s pot is a repo of its own (here, bonsai-garden-pot), not a folder inside the workshop.

Cross-references

• AGENTS.md — Pots, and what stays inside them.
• lore/bonsai.md — the workshop name (盆栽園) and the garden-as-nursery reading.
• rituals/specs/metadata-schema.md — the confidentiality: classes for stricter handling.
• The pot migration this vocabulary opens.

The history of this file, change by change, is on GitHub.